A genuinely important book. It has the potential to change the way that we think about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European encounters with the East, and about how Eastern ideas deeply influenced the thought of formative Western thinkers. -Jonathan Silk, University of Leiden Urs App's magnificent book rises as a massive-and massively erudite-bulwark against this common assumption [that Orientalism was ... Read morea product of modern colonial encounters]. A new classic in the historiography of scholarship, it reinvigorates the broad-minded approach of Frank Manuel's work, adding to it the sophistication achieved in the intervening decades of historical writing, as well as a polyglotism that few intellectual historians of Europe can hope to rival. -Intellectual History Review A great work. It establishes the ground on which all future studies of European orientalism will have to build, it rewrites the stories that scholars of religious history have been telling about the Western discovery (invention?) of Hinduism and Buddhism, it offers indispensable analyses of influential writers both famous (Bayle, Diderot, Voltaire) and now obscure, and it is a model of a truly global study of intellectual history. -Eighteenth-Century Fiction App's fascinating work fills a huge lacuna in the history of ideas, one that most scholars did not know existed. It shows that for the last five centuries Asia and Europe have been more intimately and consistently intertwined at the intellectual level than anyone had suspected. It will no doubt be the foundation stone of future research in the area, as well as bringing a new critical perspective to bear on the many studies that have been devoted to the nineteenth century continuation of the European reception of Asian thought. -Japanese Journal of Religious Studies App's book immerses its readers in the world of Enlightenment comparative religion and casts important new light on eighteenth-century European speculations about ancient Asian culture. -The American Historical Review A brilliant archaeology of the emergence of Orientalism as a scholarly discipline through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries . . . App shows us the dusty roads we Orientalists have traveled, and reminds us as nicely as he can that much of that dust is still on our saddle bags. -Journal of Chinese Religions Show Less